And remember, villains don't think of themselves as villains. As far as they're concerned, they're the heroes of their own stories, the good guys, doing battle against your evil, oppressive hero. ;)
With regard to writing villains, though, maybe it's nearing forty, but I am kind of getting tired of villains who do something despicable as a cheap and simple way of polarising reader sympathies; that story's been done and done and done. I'm much more drawn at this point to conflicts where both sides are as close to equally sympathetic as I can make them. (This is hard.)
Would it be equally as hard to be equally sympathetic (or possibly harder yet) if you hadn't had that spear-carrier feeling?
(I'm working on the idea that people with a strong sense of agency IRL would not be equally disposed to be sympathetic to both sides in fiction as those with a sense of being in the back of the phalanx. At this juncture I don't have a clear sense of which way that inequality would tilt).
Mostly, yes.
I've known three people in real life who were consciously doing "evil be thou my good" as an avowed philosophy and deriving pleasure directly from messing up other people's lives, and done enough helping clean up the resultant messes to have a bit of a hot button on the notion that everyone is the hero of our own story. (As well as the feeling that for a goodly chunk of my own life I'm much more a spear-carrier in the story, and the Thing Which I Should Be Working On is among other things an experiment with that.)
With regard to writing villains, though, maybe it's nearing forty, but I am kind of getting tired of villains who do something despicable as a cheap and simple way of polarising reader sympathies; that story's been done and done and done. I'm much more drawn at this point to conflicts where both sides are as close to equally sympathetic as I can make them. (This is hard.)
I'm in a way just the opposite. I'm tired of stories that are so realistic I can't derive joy from reading them. I don't read to feel reality, I live in it. I deal with some of the worst of it(via my job) every day. Why would I want my free time devoted to that?
Otherwise you end up with either Game of Thrones level depressing or cartoon level cliche villainy.
The balance I look for is plausibly uplifting. Without a certain amount of plausibility, all the good things in the world won't cheer me up.
mmm. Game of Thrones striking you as depressing makes it clear that we're looking at things from different angles; I'm with Iain Banks on the standard for a happy ending being "not everybody is dead", and GoT is well short of my depressing threshold.
I'm in a way just the opposite. I'm tired of stories that are so realistic I can't derive joy from reading them. I don't read to feel reality, I live in it. I deal with some of the worst of it(via my job) every day. Why would I want my free time devoted to that? At the same time I try to mix the two. I have evil people. I have good people. I have evil people doing good and good people doing evil. A story can and should have both. Otherwise you end up with either Game of Thrones level depressing or cartoon level cliche villainy.
I see it this way -- evil has a goal and will do anything to acheive that goal, Need to seige a city and kill everyone inside? Evil does it. Need a super weapon and the only person who can create the weapons don't want to have anything to do with you? Grab his daughter and give him the orders. A little old lady between you and a fortune? A shove down the stairs.
In short, Evil will do anything it can to do its thing. Most heroes have some sort of line they won't step over.
I would have to agree with this at least for the most part. Specifically I tire of reading horrific stories with disgusting endings that are defended by people saying, "That's how real life works."
Having said that I would partially agree with Neurovore. There has to be plausibility. There also has to be tension. Evil has to be successful enough, at least for a while, that I can feel some fear that the hero will die or at least be permanently scarred.
I don't think dying is the relevant scale for me; there has to be a real possibility that the hero will fail at whatever their goal is; and for a hero in a long series, that possibility is not going to feel real unless the hero actually does fail some of the time.
Right and wrong aren't that hard to see in a narrative.
And the point of fiction is to escape like the point of candy is to taste good. If those things make you feel guilty you might want to look at why. Neither of those things is wrong when it doesn't hinder your ability to manage life.
Enjoy life. It isn't incredibly long and most of it isn't fun.
Besides which, everybody could use some good old fashioned heroic altruism beat into their brains.
I oversimplified. You put it in much better terms. I agree completely.
If you mean that the moral polarity of good and evil espoused by a work of fiction is usually pretty straightforward to derive from the text, fair enough in many cases; if you want to argue good and evil as being self-evident, I'll part ways with you there. (Harry Dresden and Mr. Spock are both generally taken to be heroes, but they have radically different positions on the notion of the greatest good of the greatest number, for example.) It may well be a consequence of growing up in an environment where both my perceived politics/ethnicity and my perceived sexuality were things which some people around me were willing to be very negative on based on their zealously held takes on good and evil, up to and including risk of serious violence, but if you give me a text that suggests good and evil are obvious to all right-thinking people, I will find it untrustworthy and repellent.
I'm with Professor Tolkien when he said that the word for people who object to escapism is jailers, but I'm rejecting the notion of a black-and-white setting where good and evil are clearly laid out as one there's any appeal for me in escaping to; in that kind of setting, I always feel I'd be one of the people hanging from a lamp-post for not buying into the relevant notion of good.
I'd much rather escape to a rich and complicated banquet with lots of different and interesting food than to a heaped pile of refined sugar.
If that's the case for you, you have my sympathies. I've been able to get to a point where rather a lot of mine is, and not by doing anything that seems impossibly difficult for many other people to do.
Applying a statement like that to people who have no self-confidence already and who are full of self-loathing because of constantly being held to impossible standards, for example, is a fairly straightforward way for a simple take on good to generate suffering as a byproduct in ways that work for me as evil. That's not one I intend to write much about myself, because I'm rather too close to it personally, but it's a useful source of conflict in a story somewhat more sophisticated than merely light versus dark.
No, I'm saying that right and wrong are different from good and evil. RIght and wrong are self evident in literature. Good and evil are totally different.
I would say they exist on an axis based on the effect of an action.
Take action A. Save a mans life. It's the right thing.
Later on you find out that by saving his life you allowed him to go on and continue being a serial killer. The result of your action was evil despite it being the right thing. The axis is pretty self evident from there(and I'm using an extreme example to highlight how I see things.)
Hero: Someone who foregoes, to an extent, their personal desires to help others lives improve(or maintain).
Villain: Somebody that purposefully puts their personal desires before the good of others frequently and without care.
Right and wrong aren't that hard to see in a narrative.
And the point of fiction is to escape like the point of candy is to taste good.
If those things make you feel guilty you might want to look at why. Neither of those things is wrong when it doesn't hinder your ability to manage life. If indulging for short amounts of time makes you feel guilty you likely stress yourself out overmuch. If so, don't worry so much. Enjoy life. It isn't incredibly long and most of it isn't fun.(I apologize if this offends. Like I said. My empathy gene is overactive and the comments worried me.)
From my perspective that kind of objective use of right and wrong as terminology is every bit as uncomfortable as good and evil, and to save the life of a serial killer such that he continues killing is not by any means defensible as doing the right thing;
When writing, I like to try to see things from the antagonist's point of view. For one thing it helps to keep me from "cheating" by having the protagonist succeed only because of the antagonist's stupidity.
OK. From my perspective that kind of objective use of right and wrong as terminology is every bit as uncomfortable as good and evil, and to save the life of a serial killer such that he continues killing is not by any means defensible as doing the right thing; some of my writing is exploring that, because I am tired of characters who make judgements based on what appears immediately right and wrong before their noses without considering the longer-term consequences.
Would depend a lot to me on what the personal desires are, and how accurately the good of others is seen. I mean, where would you count a character whose personal primary motivation is To Be A Good Person, and who goes around helping other people out of the purely selfish desire to count as someone good ? (Not hypocritically or to be perceived as good in the community, but to be able to honestly see themselves as sincerely and genuinely good ?)
On the topic of actions being right with bad consequences. We cannot foresee the consequences of our actions. We should not be judged for consequences that cannot be foreseen.
and I loathe stories where a bunch of sides that are all trying to do the right thing end up butchering each other due to lack of communication,
They make me feel sick to my stomach and hate the characters for being idiots.
Why ever not?
How is that selfish? Reasons behind helping people don't matter.
On the topic of actions being right with bad consequences. We cannot foresee the consequences of our actions.
On the subject of do I want the villain to be a second hero with a different philosophy than the hero? Hell no, possibly an antagonist for a while, but not a villain. That's whats called a hero. In the end they compromise with the other hero and figure things out in such a way as to stop the people that are honestly the villains.
I loathe stories where a bunch of sides that are all trying to do the right thing end up butchering each other due to lack of communication, closed minded characters,
If you're neither arguing for intent nor for results here, that seems to me to leave an interestingly narrow window for actually analysing, or justifying the morality your stories explore.
Not unto the end of the universe, no. But, to take an example that should be familiar to all of us, if your protagonist has a choice between saving his girlfriend and starting a war, and he picks starting a war knowing full well it will happen, that's a consequence he can foresee and be held responsible for.
You think every possible hero is by definition capable of compromising with every other possible hero ?
How about, due to genuine, deep, intractable and real philosophical differences ?
One of my gripes with the most recent movie Joker was that it was never clear to me what his motivation was (crazy may be part of the motivation but by itself it is not enough for me. )
There aren't logical philosophical differences too deep to compromise in an altruistic morality. Compromise can always be made if everyone works towards the concept of compromise.
There are cultural ones, but not cultural ones based in rationality. Nobody should be so ingrained in a tradition so deeply they cannot bypass it. (Now, most people are, but I find irredeemable cultural differences to be an obnoxious plot device. It encourages closed mindedness.
Shouldn't stories be about making things better, not stagnating and giving in to the same problems we deal with every day? Shouldn't they be a pathway to making people think past and through problems?
I can however forgive him for doing it because I understand the anger he felt.
Is it plausible to write your first book of a series and introduce one of the primary series villains in Book 1? The end of the story would basically be a, "I'll get you next time Gadget!" moment. But I wasn't sure if this would be a bad choice - if I should concentrate on a lower level antagonist.
This would definately be one of those, "As long as I can think up good stories then I'll keep writing about this character," much like Dresden or Atticus of the Iron Druid Chronicles.
But sometimes in books, sort of like in The Dresden Files, there are enemies or enemy groups waiting in the shadows for their time to shine, for example the Black Council.
This Villian I've been cooking up has a lot of history with the hero and would almost be like a, "look in the mirror and see your dark side," kind of character(Still tinkering with that), but I don't want to throw too much oomph into Book 1 and then have this villian be less interesting to readers down the road when he returns.
How much of that history would you want to get into book 1, then, and how much could legitimately be saved for later volumes ?
But like I said my current plan is to make this guy one of the primary series villains, so I have to leave some of the mystery for later. Maybe instead of the primary villian I should cast him in more of a supportive role or cameo, where he's in charge of the villian going after the hero. I'm not sure. Stuff to figure out! That's why I'm here! ;D
One thing that's always bugged me about so many recent fictional examples of a supposed moral dilemma in that general direction is that the question always seems to boil down to "is it right for us to torture X to find out the bit of information needed to save Y when it's the only way to get that information ?". I don't think I've ever seen anything talking to "is it right for us to steal the Hope Diamond and give it to Y" or "is it right for us to have wild monkey sex of the sort Y's always dreamed of" if those are ways of getting the information out of Y, instead.
Because having wild monkey sex with their kidnappers isn't something that many people want to do?
Plus, a lot of these dilemmas happen on a timescale in which stealing the Hope Diamond wouldn't be practicable.
Fair comment; the more general idea was why the dilemma is so much more often framed as torturing the antagonist rather than bribing or seducing them and I think that stands as a more general point, though.
Consider this, then. Group A get hold of time-travel technology. Group A see this as an opportunity to prevent historical atrocities, and set about doing so.
(well, unless they were An*ta Bl*ke, for whom it would be business as usual in the last eight books or so)
You caught me off guard with this one. Luckily I wasn't drinking anything or I would have flushed out my sinus cavities.